EDITOR’S NOTE: You might notice that our series name and description are slightly different. From this point forward, this series will be called LGBTQ Literature. Same series, different name. This is a change I’ve been considering for a while now, and it seems right, as the “Q” will be more inclusive of people and experiences that do not necessarily fit neatly under the L, the G, the B, or the T. Just wanted to make a note to let our readers know! We will continue to publish our diaries under the “LGBTLiterature” tag (in addition to the “LGBTQLiterature” tag) in order to allow easier access to all of our diaries. - Chrislove
LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.
“He –- for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it -– was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.” –-Virginia Woolf, Orlando, opening sentence.
Imagine a 15-year-old American girl of upper-middle suburbia — lying stretched on the carpet of a faux-Colonial room — curious what might be under the ambiguous front cover, cloth of a blue nearly black, title unreadable.
Virginia Stephen (Woolf) about age 20, by George Charles Beresford, 1902 (Wikipedia)
She scans the first sentence, is hooked, immerses.
In reverie, she is now Orlando, 16-year-old Elizabethan nobleman and would-be poet, who in turn is dreaming, as he practices his swordplay, that he is one of his own warrior ancestors.
The story unfolds. On that first day, young Orlando turns from swordsmanship to poetry, takes a walk to his favorite hilltop, and charms Queen Elizabeth at a ceremonial dinner. Soon he is summoned to court, becomes her favorite, dallies with ladies of varied rank, and detours into the seamier purlieus of London.
After some time he becomes engaged to a noblewoman — only to fall passionately in love with a mysterious foreign visitor. He first sees the stranger during a Frost Fair on the iced-over Thames (apparently based on a real event during the exteme winter of 1608):
“...[A] figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled [Orlando] with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet...But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind...When the boy, for alas...no woman could skate with such speed and vigour –- swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair...but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had those eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea.”
The illicit affair, torrid as the winter is cold, ends in tears, with Orlando exiled to the country.
He isolates himself in his family’s huge, ancient country house (his father must have passed away, like Queen Elizabeth, without notice by the writer). Eventually Orlando invites one guest, professional writer Nick Greene. The visit brings both pleasure and disillusionment. He turns to refurbishing the house and finally fills it with guests, restoring his position in society.
At this point, however, Orlando is uncomfortably pursued – indeed, stalked – by a lanky, horsefaced Archduchess from Romania. To evade her, he decamps to Constantinople in the role of British Ambassador.
There follows an imperialist and Orientalist phase of the novel, which ends when Orlando is elevated to a Dukedom, only to fall unconscious during a riot that breaks out at his official residence.
Orlando is left all alone afterwards, the rioters having taken him for dead.
Our suburban teen, still riveted, reaches pages 136-37, where she reads —
WHAT?
Would that we might spare the reader what is to come....But here, alas, Truth, Candour and Honesty...cry No!...[T]hey peal forth, The Truth and nothing but the Truth!...at which Orlando woke.
He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! We have no choice but to confess–-
“[Orlando] was a woman.”
WHAT?
Our teenaged reader lacks background equal to the interpretation.
There is so much she has failed to understand, even to observe: the extravagances, the conscious historical mix-ups and anachronisms, literary echoes, artful shifts and evasions and omissions, even the unreasonable length of Orlando’s life.
She has failed to “get" much of the humor, which is everywhere.
Nevertheless she pursues the strange story to the end, enjoying the surprises, the imagery, the swing and music of the prose, the insouciance of the author’s voice, and the erotic energy.
She barely notices the small-print dedication: “To V. Sackville-West.”
……..
Vita Sackville-West, 1924
Decades later.
The grown woman picks up a small volume with a torn jacket, titled Portrait of a Marriage. It falls open in the middle. Her gaze happens to light on a quotation on page 115.
I advance, therefore, the perfectly accepted theory that
cases of dual personality do exist, in which the feminine and the masculine elements alternately preponderate.
I advance this in an impersonal and scientific spirit, and claim that I am qualified to speak with the intimacy a professional scientist could only acquire after years of study and indirect information, because I have the object of study always to hand, in my own heart, and can gauge the exact truthfulness of what my own experience tells me. However frank, people would always keep back something. I can’t keep back anything from myself.
–Vita Sackville-West, private diary, Sept. 27, 1920, quoted in Nicholson, p. 115. (Emphasis added.)
Oh, the reader thinks.
Another person.
Someone who evidently traveled a similar path to mine, all alone as I did, to a similar self-knowledge, almost a century ago, expressing it much as I would have to do — with no “objective” evidence possible, no authority but that of thorough, conscientious introspection, over a period of many years.
”I am qualified to speak...because I have the object of study...in my own heart….I can’t keep back anything from myself.”
Exactly, she thinks. Exactly.
(“Perfectly accepted theory,” were those words really written in 1920? Too optimistic, even yet.)
…..
Vita
Knole, the childhood home of Vita Sackville-West, which, as a woman, she was barred from inheriting.
Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) was the offspring of an ancient, eccentric and aristocratic line, and in her own right a public figure, a copious author of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
Her family had an estate in the county of Kent, called Knole, granted to her ancestor Thomas Sackville by no less than Queen Elizabeth I herself. Vita adored Knole but — any other legal impediments aside — could never have inherited it simply because (to be blunt) she lacked a penis.
Her family had never been known for a bourgeois sense of morality. Vita herself, before her marriage, logged a couple of affairs with individuals of both genders.
In 1913 she married — after a time of somber doubts — a young diplomat, Harold Nicholson. She soon accompanied him to his posting as Ambassador in Constantinople. By 1917, the couple had two sons.
Things did not proceed on a conventional course, however. The spouses spent much time apart and maintained an open marriage. He had numerous affairs with men, she with both men and women. Their partnership nevertheless was successful, loving and lifelong.
Vita also became explicitly conscious, she wrote in a private diary of a double aspect to her inner self, male and female. This happened in the spring of 1918 at the couple’s country house, Long Barn.
Violet [Keppel, a former schoolmate] wrote and asked whether she could come and stay with me...I was bored by the idea...She had been here about a week when everything changed suddenly...changed my life. It was the 18th of April….I had just got clothes like the women-on-the-land [temporary wartime farm workers] were wearing, and in the unaccustomed freedom of breeches and gaiters I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a schoolboy let out on holiday; and Violet followed me across woods and fields….It was one of the most vibrant days of my life. As it happened, Harold was not coming down that night...we talked…
Violet had struck the secret of my duality; she attacked me about it, and I made no attempt to conceal it from her or from myself….
--Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Nicholson, pp. 111-12
The two women soon became lovers. Within the context of the affair, Vita sometimes presented herself as a man; she called herself Julian.
Drama naturally followed. In the course of it Violet got married. Afterwards, however, Violet and Vita left their husbands and decamped to France together. They were retrieved by a joint expedition of the two men, flying a small plane — possibly in part at the instigation of Vita’s family, who may have felt that quiet deviations from propriety were normal, but public scandal could not be tolerated.
Vita later composed a novel based on the affair. “When the novel was already in proof, Vita’s mother objected forcefully to the publication (shame on family, children, etc.) so when the book finally broke into print, it sank without a trace,” states Mary Ann Caws in her edition of Vita’s work. (The literary quality of this particular novel, however, might have had a little something to do with that as well.)
Her better-know works as of today include a history of Knole, works on gardening, and a novel, All Passion Spent, about a diplomat’s widow, which to my mind conveys a humanism not unlike that in the novels of her contemporary, E.M. Forster.
I believe that [one day] the psychology of people like myself will be of interest, and I believe it will be recognized that many more people of my type exist than under the present-day system of hypocrisy is commonly admitted.
--Vita Sackville-West, private diary, quoted in Nicholson, p. 114
Today, at last, there is growing recognition that many people, of Sackville-West’s precise type or otherwise, cannot be forced into binary gender boxes — nor feel entirely at ease in stereotyped relationships.
Virginia
Adeline Virginia (Stephen) Woolf (1882-1941) was a daughter of a distinguished man of letters, Sir Leslie Stephen. Her early life had certain dramatic aspects, For instance she grew up in the shadow of a nearly literal “madwoman in the attic,” an older half-sister with an unspecified mental disability, who was kept isolated. As a very young girl, Virginia was sexually molested by a much older male cousin, to the lasting detriment of her emotional health.
She became a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, the informal London society of artists and intellectuals that brought together an extraordinary set of personalities, many known for their sexual non-conformity. Among these personalities, to cite just one example, was the painter Dora Carrington, who all her life maintained a close, devoted, but non-sexual relationship with the gay male writer Lytton Strachey,
Virginia also was part of the scandalous Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, in which half a dozen Blooomsburyites impersonated members of the Abyssinian royal family, to the discomfiture of the Royal Navy, with Virginia herself in male drag,
She married Leonard Woolf in 1912. Besides pursuing their own literary careers, the two founded and ran a small but prestigious publishing company, the Hogarth Press.
They decided to have no children. Virginia was emotionally fragile; she suffered episodes of severe depression, the illness that eventually claimed her life. Alongside her writing, however, she maintained an impressive array of friendships and literary connections.
Virginia met Vita Sackville-West in 1922. The two had a brief affair; still more importantly, they developed a close and enduring friendship that nurtured the creativity of both. This was the origin of Orlando, published in 1928.
It was Woolf’s first truly light-hearted work and as such, a divergence from a heretofore serious literary career,
“This Orlando — we did not care for the sound of it,” wrote the novelist Elizabeth Bowen. “The book was, we gathered, in the nature of a prank, or a private joke; worse still, its genesis was personal.” (Quoted in Harris, p 99)
Once again Vita (with Virginia’s help this time) apparently had broken a cardinal rule: “Just don’t do it in the street and scare the horses.”
Orlando
In relation to Sackville-West, Orlando is indeed thick with personal references. The protagonist’s ancestral home references Knole; his affair with the Russian princess seems to comment on the turbulent affair with Violet; the episode in Constantinople, her stint as a diplomatic wife. After her transformation, Orlando travels for a time with a band of gypsies, chiming with Sackville-West’s claim of some gypsy ancestry.
At the same time Orlando is a tale engaging in itself, playful, acerbic, rich with insight, humor and wit.
One thread of the plot follows Orlando’s development as a poet and, by extension, forms an allegorical history of English poetry. The gypsy phase, to name just one instance, surely reflects Matthew Arnold’s poetic figure of the scholar-gypsy,
As well, I see Orlando as a daring thought-experiment or extended meditation on sex, gender, sexual preference, societal roles, and the unpredictable relations among these, as construed by an audacious mind — a hundred years before more than a handful of readers would be willing to roam as boldly over these subjects.
Shortly after her transformation:
And as all Orlando’s loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardly of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings she had had as a man. — Orlando, p. 161
.
“....but in every other respect Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, although it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory – but for in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’– her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle....Orlando herself showed no surprise at it.”
.
Eventually tiring of gypsy life, Orlando returns by ship to England, and meditates on the experience of being female, from the point of view of a (recently male) newcomer. The return home, however, humorous as it is, somewhat prefigures difficulties of more modern trans individuals:
No sooner had she returned to her home in Blackfriars than she was made aware if a succession of Bow Street runners and other grave emissaries from the Law Courts that she was a party to three major suits, as well as innumerable minor litigations….The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to the same thing; and (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosa Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to them. (p. 168)
Nevertheless, she is able to return to her ancestral home, where her first visitor none other than the horse-faced Archduchess!
A plague on women,” said Orlando to herself, going to the cupboard to fetch a glass of wine. “They never leave one a moment’s peace…
[S]he turned to present the Archduchess with the salver and behold – in her place stood a tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone with a man.
Recalled suddenly to a consciousness of her sex...Orlando felt seized with faintness.
“La!” she cried, putting her hand to her side,” how you frighten me!”
...[T]hey acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse. The Archduchess...told his story – that he was a man and had always been one; that he had seen a portrait of Orlando and fallen hopelessly in love with him; that to compass his ends he had dressed as a woman...that he was desolated when he fled to Turkey; that he had heard of her change and hastened to offer his services....” (179)
(But the attraction is not mutual and Orlando declines to marry him.)
Further samples:
She was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person...The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it...They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. (p. 187)
and
[There] was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random...? ...She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again...the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. (p. 189)
This diary is already long.
Let it only be mentioned that Orlando continues to visit London in male disguise. She is in women’s clothes, however, when on a dark and stormy night, she barely avoids being trampled by a man on horseback.
A few minutes later, they became engaged.
Though not without a trifle more gender confusion.
The gardens at Sissinghurst, where Sackville-West and her husband settled in the 1930s. Now the property of the National Trust.
In the Victorian period, Orlando sees her “Oak Tree” poem published. She gives birth to a son. As memory revisits and re-integrates experience, time itself seems to dissolve into elastic, translucent layers. New elements appear: electric lights, motor cars, department stores. Now she is back at her ancestral home, revisiting her hill, her tree on an evening in 1928...when…
….to her great happiness, her husband arrives, but otherwise, nothing final occurs.
Reflection
Sackville-West’s introspection apparently did not lead her to posit a further distinction that begins to be more clearly recognized today: the difference between sexual preference and an interior feeling of gender. When in her male aspect, Vita apparently felt exclusively attracted to women; in her female aspect, to men.
Orlando, however, suggests that Woolf’s view may have been less categorical.
The novel is, among other things, a buoyant description of how reality, ever burgeoning, insists on overflowing the compartments in which humanity attempts to enclose it.
To live becomes all the more remarkable an adventure, as we grow more willing to own all of our experiences and experience all of ourselves.
.
REFERENCES
The sheer volume of scholarship on Woolf, Sackville-West and others in their circle is intimidating. I’ve done little more than make contact at a few points. Apart from Wikipedia, I used these:
Harris, Alexandra. Virginia Woolf. New York: Thames & Hudson Inc., 2011.
Nicholson, Nigel. Portrait of a Marriage: V. Sackville-West & Harold Nicholson. New York: Atheneum, 1973.
Sackville-West, Vita. Selected Writings. Ed. by Mary Ann Caws. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. (Paperback; originally published in hardcover by Palgrave, 2002.)
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928. (First American edition.)
….
Caution: the n-word occurs in Orlando, once, in a period context. In addition, there is some ethnic stereotyping (though IMO, it is neither ill-intended nor as gross as in quite a few other works of the same era.)
Virginia Woolf, 1927, photographer unknown (Wikipedia). She was working on Orlando at this time.
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